Michael Weir: Stakes high for Hibs’ forthcoming fixtures

Two weeks ago, I thought Hibs looked ready to pull away and open up a decent gap, but since then we’ve been knocked off the top by Queen of the South and allowed others, like Raith Rovers, Falkirk and Dundee United, to catch us up.

It’s still early days and there’s lots of football to be played, but I really hoped we could have given ourselves an early cushion, knocked the stuffing out of our rivals, and eased a bit of the pressure on ourselves.

If we’d won our last two games, we’d have been in control, so it’s disappointing the way things have panned out. In isolation, Saturday’s point against Queens wasn’t a bad one considering we were at a tough venue and down to ten men, but overall I think every Hibs fan would have expected more than one point from our last two games.

We’ve put real pressure on ourselves as we’re now facing a run of high-stakes games against teams like United and Raith, who will be hoping to do further damage to us and creep into the mix themselves.

Queens will definitely be up there while Falkirk are now starting to click and they’ve shown last season they can sustain form for the duration of a season. Raith are doing well and I wouldn’t count United out yet because I think they’ve got a good bit of improvement to come, so there are plenty real threats emerging just a couple of weeks after it looked like we might be about to pull away and take control of the title race.

Now that they’re up and running, the rest of the teams are not just going to go away, so it’s up to us to deal with the pressure.

The problem at the moment seems to be in the attacking area. We’ve only scored two goals in our last three games and that’s not good enough for a team with our aspirations, so I can see why the manager has taken a pop at the strikers. I’d be reluctant to single out Jason Cummings because he’s still only 21 and has generally carried us in a goalscoring sense through the early part of the season. There’s a lot of pressure on his young shoulders, but we certainly need the rest of the attackers and the midfielders to start chipping in with their share of goals.